Minor Keys

The question, of course, is why. For Zatorre and many other neuroscientists, what goes on in the brain’s substrates is linked to the very essence of human evolution. “An animal needs something to tell it how to survive, and the way the brain reacts to music seems to be akin to the way it reacts to all the things that are important to survival.”

That argument is taken further by Canadian-born musicologist David Huron, now head of the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory at Ohio State University, and author of Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Interviewed over the phone, with a purring cat on his lap (“I’m getting a nice rush of oxytocin here”), Huron is exuberant as he describes his research, which included an experiment he conducted as a professor at the University of Waterloo. He was studying the effect sad or happy music might have on the perception of a group of Psychology 101 students, who had been told that the experiment had a different goal entirely: to study changes in their heart rates. Half the students listened to “happy” music — a selection of bluegrass tunes. (Huron calls it the Steve Martin effect: “It’s hard to play sad music on a banjo,” he says, for musicological reasons that have been dissected at great length, but which seem to boil down to the fact that banjos “plink,” while more resonant instruments such as the guitar go “dnng.”) For the sad-music group, researchers selected tracks from Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks. Each group listened to the music for fifteen minutes. Then a researcher interviewed the students, asking them, among other things, to estimate how well they would do in their final grades.

Huron and his colleagues were gratified to find significant differences between the groups’ assessments of their likely academic performance. Those who had listened to the happy banjo music tended to overestimate their marks, while the Eno listeners were much more realistic. “It’s almost as though when people listen to sad music, it’s a way of grounding themselves,” Huron concludes.

Whatever effect music may have on us, it is a form of “drugs without the drugs,” says Huron, happily. In fact, in subsequent research into the sad/happy music question (one of his studies will soon appear in the Empirical Musicology Review), he has suggested clear links between our responses to instrumental music and human speech. He described a distinct progression in the emotional experiences of subjects who reported their feelings upon listening to sad music: first, an empathy akin to what they might feel hearing the voice of a loved one in pain; then a flood of associations in the “acoustic cues,” triggering memories involving the music (the proverbial “they’re playing our song” phenomenon); finally, rumination or “sad thoughts.”

Huron also sees an evolutionary link in his findings. When we respond to music with chills down the spine, for instance, we may be experiencing something akin to what a mother would feel hearing the cry of a lost child: we become hyperalert and focused, with adrenalin at the ready — whatever it takes to find and protect the child.

When music makes us cry, Huron points out, our tears are filled with the hormone prolactin, which is integral to the essential human bonding experience of breast feeding, and which women produce in greater quantities than men. This, along with the release of hormones such as dopamine and oxytocin, mimics the well-being we feel in the most intense moments of connection with others — nursing an infant, having sex, receiving praise. “It’s biology wrapping its arms around you and saying, ‘there there,’” he says. In an abstract for an article entitled “Why Do Listeners Enjoy Music That Makes Them Weep?” Huron writes: “I suggest that the pleasure of musically induced weeping arises from cortical inhibition of the amygdala, and is linked to the release of the hormone prolactin . . . Weeping shares a deep kinship with laughter, frisson (‘chills’), and awe (‘gasping’) — responses that philosopher Edmund Burke called the ‘sublime emotions.’”

Of course, this paradoxical dynamic — seeking out a “sad” song in order to feel “happy” in the end — doesn’t work for the depressive. The tears may flow, the heart rate might change, but there’s no “there, there” there.

For research into the brains of the mood disordered, I had to turn from musicologists to the work of Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry who runs the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Davidson is known for his research into the brain’s plasticity — its ability to change and to heal. He and his colleagues have found that the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus (all parts of the brain that respond to music) in depressed people show clear differences from those in normal subjects. And one result might be, in one of my favourite phrases ever, “context-inappropriate emotional responding” — tears at a tulip festival, for example. But his research also represents good news: brains can change, for the better, through many therapies, including antidepressants.

Most of us, depressed or not, have had the experience of being profoundly moved by a piece of music when we hear a particular sequence of notes, played in a particular way, at a particular time in our lives. In the normally functioning brain (as opposed to the depressed brain), sad music may actually perform the function of restoring our happiness — or at least our emotional equilibrium. Sad music, as Huron suggests, may ground us. This may explain why anyone can go online and find lengthy discussions among people who, far from avoiding Garnet Rogers and Rufus Wainwright, actively seek, share, and revel in sad music.

“Can anyone recommend some pensive, melancholy, dirge-like chamber music for rainy days and blue moods?” writes “Crotalus” on the w